I mean the guy is banned for life from trading for securities after his Ponzi scheme was busted, but

I mean the guy is banned for life from trading for securities after his Ponzi scheme was busted, but I’m sure the $1M+ he got in pandemic loans from the government for his “businesses” is all legit.

Right?

Maybe it is to help the legal fees for the accused serial rapist actor.

David Gentile

Danny Masterson

Scientology

From hero to zero: How David Gentile kept his $1.7 billion running for so long

How Brooklyn-born David Gentile rose to the top and was able to run a $1.7 billion Ponzi scheme for four years we still don’t know in complete detail, but connections with the Church of Scientology and Russian organized crime help us understand how he could sustain such high credibility among his Wall Street peers and with the media despite the growing number of whistleblowers and law firms pointing to the contrary.

Where there is smoke there is fire. Now that the Securities Exchange Commission finally charged David Gentile with running a Ponzi scheme, law firm Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane & Conway, issued a revealing statement that serves to remind what everyone chose to forget for too long:

“My law firm has been sounding the alarm on this for 18 months. GPB Capital is a classic Ponzi scheme involving nearly $2 billion in funds from thousands of Main Street investors who got roped in by thirsty hustlers. It is disappointing that the financial world essentially gave GPB Capital a pass. After Madoff, there is just no excuse”, said managing partner Joseph Peiffer.

“As recently as last fall, we went public again and said that ‘GPB Capital has to be stopped.’ The toll inflicted by the unbridled and unrestrained greed of the principals and financial professionals behind this Ponzi scheme already have destroyed lives, retirement plans, and it will take years for the full extent of the damage done here to be sorted out. For any investors still on the sidelines, these new criminal charges should remove any doubt about their GPB investments bouncing back.”

Pfeiffer Wolf also warned in July 2020 that the GPB Capital Ponzi scheme was getting up to $7 million in Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds in what they called “may be one of the most flagrant abuses of taxpayer dollars of this century.”

According to the law firm, most of the 17,000 investors are retirees concentrated in Texas, Florida, and Arizona, and it estimates that the scam got hold of up to $2 billion. The SEC, however, is charging the David Gentile and associates with a $1.7 billion fraud. – Source

Which of the Masterson brothers profited from their Scientology stepdad’s Ponzi scheme?

Every few months we hear that the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office is about to make a decision whether to charge Scientology celebrity Danny Masterson after seven women came forward to the LAPD with rape allegations against the That ’70s Show actor. It’s been more than three years since the initial three women came forward, and now DA Jackie Lacey has her hands full with protesters who don’t like her poor record for prosecuting bad cops.

Lacey’s plenty busy, we understand. So while we wait for her to make up her mind, we thought we’d tell you about other legal matters that may have impacted Masterson because they have definitely impacted his family members.

Danny and Christopher are children from Carol Anne Nicholson’s first marriage, to Peter Masterson. She was subsequently married to Joe Reaiche, and they had two children of their own, Jordan and Alanna, who are both actors and who both took the name Masterson rather than their father’s name, and both of them “disconnected” from Reaiche after he left Scientology in 2005. Joe’s former stepsons, Danny and Christopher, also disconnected from him. He hears nothing at all from his former wife Carol or the four kids he helped raise.

Meanwhile, Rusty Tweed has three stepsons: Danny and Christopher from Carol’s first marriage, and Jordan Masterson from her second.

With us so far?

We should also pause to note, sadly, that Rusty also had a previous marriage, to a woman named Cathy Tweed, and he was stepfather to Cathy’s daughter Tayler Tweed. We’ve written about how Tayler struggled with life in a Scientology family, talked openly about leaving the church, and then committed suicide in 2014 at the age of 27. Tayler’s struggle with Scientology and her suicide were also the subject of an episode of Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath.

Rusty and Cathy Tweed divorced in 1998, court records show, and then Rusty and Carol Masterson got together soon after.

Anyway, Rusty made a living as a financial advisor and in 2008 he started promoting a new opportunity for his clients. He called it the “Athenian Fund.” Over the next two years he convinced 24 investors to put $1.7 million into the fund, which is an average of about $70,000 from each investor.

Tweed told his investors that the Athenian Fund was going to be putting its money into something called PMI that would use sophisticated algorithms to produce big returns.

We’ve run into PMI before.

Back in 2013, we wrote about a Utah couple who were suing because they say they were duped into investing in a Scientologist-run Ponzi scheme called Portfolio Manager International. PMI was supposed to use computer algorithms to predict currency fluctuations and capitalize on them. But instead it turned out to be an investment scam.

One of the people involved in running PMI who ended up going to prison was a Mormon former mayor of Cedar Hills, Utah named Eric Richardson. In February 2010, Richardson signed a bank loan that ended up getting him convicted of bank fraud and a year-long prison sentence.

And right around that time, in March 2010, for some reason Rusty Tweed gave up on the idea of investing his Athenian Fund in PMI and instead gave it all to Richardson for something that Richardson had named Quantitative Analytics Master Fund.

Tweed didn’t tell his investors that he had changed his mind about where to invest their money.

Richardson’s QAMF was supposed to make a killing with a “quantitative trading platform that acts to actively manage the long and short side price cycles of a portfolio of liquid equity securities.”

Sounds legit.

By October, Tweed realized that he’d made a mistake. QAMF wasn’t delivering, and he asked Richardson to give back the $1.7 million. But by that time, Richardson had already lost about $650,000 of it. (Tweed later learned that Richardson had invested it in a Ghanian gold mine without telling him.) Richardson gave Tweed back $924,460 of the initial $1.7 million. Tweed then learned that Richardson was being investigated and criminally charged for bank fraud.

Now, here’s where we find out what Tweed was made of. He’d told 24 people who had handed over significant sums of money that he was going to help them beat the market by investing in something called PMI, but then, without telling them he handed the money over to one of the people he’d met at PMI, the good mayor of Cedar Hills, who had come up with his own betting operation called QAMF. Within a few months, however, nearly half of the money was gone and the former mayor was looking at prison time.

So Tweed was a stand up guy, went back to his investors, admitted that he hadn’t told them that he’d trusted a guy who turned out to be going to prison, and that they would have to accept only half of what they’d put in, right?

No, that’s not what he did.

Instead, according to the SEC, which investigated the matter, Tweed lied to his investors, telling them that their money was “tied up” and not refundable for another year, and then he produced false reports that the money was secure.

In March 2011 Tweed made matters worse by carving out $200,000 of the $924,460 that he’d managed to get back from Richardson and loaned it to a Clearwater software business, Teamwork Retail, run by a Scientologist friend of his, Michael Mauerer. The loan was supposed to generate 18 percent interest when it came due in September 2011, but no interest was paid and neither was the loan. Teamwork Retail declared bankruptcy in 2013.

Through 2014, Tweed’s company continued to lie to its clients, telling them that these investments were secure and making money.

And even worse, Tweed made sure that some investors got paid as if their investments had actually made money before he eventually revealed to the others that they were screwed. (This is what happens in a Ponzi scheme, a few investors come out all right while the rest lose their shirts.)

For example, in the first quarter of 2012 Tweed gave one person who had invested $50,000 in the Athenian Fund a check for $50,103.25 as if the losses had never happened, the losses that other investors would have to eat.

In court documents filed by the SEC and FINRA, which also investigated the matter, that investor who got a check for $50,103.25 is identified only partially.

In those documents he is only referred to as Tweed’s “stepson.” – Source

GPB Capital Founder and CEO Among Three Individuals Indicted in Private Equity Investment Fraud

An indictment was unsealed today in federal court in Brooklyn charging three individuals affiliated with GPB Capital Holdings, LLC (“GPB”) with securities fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy. Defendants David Gentile, the founder, owner and Chief Executive Officer (“CEO”) of GPB; Jeffry Schneider, the owner and CEO of Ascendant Capital LLC (“Ascendant”); and Jeffrey Lash, a former managing partner of GPB, are charged with engaging in a scheme to defraud investors by misrepresenting the source of funds used to make monthly distribution payments to them and the amount of revenue generated by two of GPB’s investment funds, GPB Holdings, LP and GPB Automotive Portfolio, LP. The defendants were arrested today, and Gentile will appear this afternoon in federal court in Boston, Massachusetts, Schneider will appear in federal court in Austin, Texas, and Lash in federal court in Fort Myers, Florida. – Source